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September 03, 2010

Google Tweaks Privacy Policies

[Amy Miller]

It probably won’t satisfy the fiercest critics of Google’s privacy policies, who claim the company has strayed too far from its “Don’t be Evil” mantra. One advocacy group has even put up a billboard in Times Square showing a sinister Joker-like character, in the likeness of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, offering kids free ice cream as he steals their personal information.

But Google is tweaking its privacy policies hoping to make them easier to understand, associate general counsel Mike Yang announced Friday on the search engine’s official blog. The changes take effect October 3.

“Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand,” Yang wrote. “We aren’t changing any of our privacy practices. We want to make our policies more transparent and understandable.”

Yang said Google is cutting out redundant sections of its main privacy policy and re-writing the legal jargon in others so that non-lawyers can understand them. It’s also getting rid of a dozen individual privacy policies that covered specific products and services. They will soon be covered by Google’s main privacy policy. And Google is adding new tools to its privacy center to help people find information more easily.

“Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer),” Yang wrote. “But hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction.”